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I am very new to microcontrollers. I have designed the frimware part of my project via Launchpad. Now I have to have a PCB design. As for GPIO, I am using two pins for UART, one pin for ADC and one pin for digital input.
For this basic setup, what should I know?
What are the basic design requirements, how to do coupling, etc. and where?
What are the other questions I should have asked?
If there is any material I can find answers for my questions, it is well appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

Hi everyone,
I am in the process of evaluating which tool might be more suitable for the design of relatively simple boards.
From the alternatives that I found, diptrace and eagle seem to be the top contenders. These are clearly tools not intended for complex jobs, although they can get the thing done for a fraction of the cost of more capable tools.
I think eagle has a cumbersome way of defining the coverage of vias with soldermask.
The management of component libraries would be better if eagle had an automated way of updating a landpattern accross all libraries that make use of it.
We can't mirror the view of the PCB, so that we could see the bottom from below (instead of seing text right-to-left)
I whish eagle had a way to design a track ending that could gradualy decrease width up to the point it reaches the pad with the pad's own width (thus not covering 3 pads at once :]
Eagle's user interface is well.... a world of its own. It has a steep learning curve, but, once we get the hang of it, it can be used efficiently, specially if we use the command line interface
These are my rants on eagle, or at least what I can remember now.
I tried diptrace (by trying I mean install and run if for the first time :grin: ) and noticed the following:
The library and part chooser in the schematic editor are well... ugly and hardly useable.
Some of the dialogues remind me of windows 3.1 (yup, that's right).
And so I gave up exploring diptrace beyond that point.
I don't care much about builtin component libraries, as I tend to build my own when I need something new for a design.
Whats are your main criticisms about eagle and/or diptrace?
This is not intended to start a flame war or any kind of inflated/passionate standpoints.
I'd just like to know what are generally known weak points of each tool so that me, and others, know what to count with, when adopting one or the other.
Thanks!
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